Goethe spent more than sixty years in the process of developing himself harmoniously on all sides; and few men have wasted less time than he.

And yet in the case of each of these rigorous and faithful students there were other, and, for long periods, more engrossing occupations.

Any one who knows men widely will recall those whose persistent utilisation of the odds and ends of time, which many people regard as of too little value to save by using, has given their minds and their lives that peculiar distinction of taste, manner, and speech which belong to genuine culture.
It is not wealth of time, but what Mr.Gladstone has aptly called "thrift of time," which brings ripeness of mind within reach of the great mass of men and women.

The man who has learned the value of five minutes has gone a long way toward making himself a master of life and its arts.

"The thrift of time," says the English statesman, "will repay in after life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature beyond your darkest reckoning." And Matthew Arnold has put the same truth into words which touch the subject in hand still more closely: "The plea that this or that man has no time for culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin to examine seriously into our present use of time." It is no exaggeration to say that the mass of men give to unplanned and desultory reading of books and newspapers an amount of time which, if intelligently and thoughtfully given to the best books, would secure, in the long run, the best fruits of culture.
There is no magic about this process of enriching one's self by absorbing the best books; it is simply a matter of sound habits patiently formed and persistently kept up.